Louise Whiteley Microbes on the Mind Talks
To celebrate the end of the Microbes on the Mind project at Medical Museion, we are hosting two open lectures in the auditorium, alongside the evening art performance Sensing Holobiont: Flavourful Rituals for Metabolic Companions.
In the first talk, Dr Josh Evans from the DTU Microbes Initiative will talk about his work with microbial and human fermenters on the culinary frontier. In the second, Dr Louise Whiteley will share some of the findings from Microbes on the Mind, talking about the challenges with talking about our strange relationship to the teeming multitudes that live on and in us.
The talks are free and no registration is needed – details below and on our events page.
These events are part of the project ‘Microbes on the Mind’, funded by the Velux Foundation Core Group Awards and supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR). Microbes on the Mind was led by Louise Whiteley, and included (alphabetically) Adam Bencard, Marie Chimwemwe Degnbol, Joana Formosinho, Tine Friis, Cecilie Glerup, Guston Sondin-Kung, and Andréa Wiszmeg. Image from ‘Sensing Holobiont: Flavourful Rituals for Metabolic Companions’, Baum & Leahy.
TALK 1: Multispecies collaboration: is it possible?
- Tuesday 10th Januar
- 10.30-11.15 Dr Josh Evans, Danish Technical University (DTU) Microbes Initiative
- In the Auditorium at Medical Museion, Bredgade 62.
- No tickets required, doors open from 10.15.
Multispecies scholarship is caught between the desire to acknowledge our nonhuman kin and the need to acknowledge the mystery of other species. Nowhere might this tension be more great than with microbes, whose difference — both among microbial kinds and between them and humans—continues to surprise. In this talk, I will share some examples of my work with microbial and human fermenters on the culinary frontier to explore the promise and limits of ‘collaboration’ as a way to frame multispecies relationships.
TALK 2: Microbes on the Mind
- Wednesday 11th January
- 9.00-9.45 Dr Louise Whiteley, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
- In the Auditorium at Medical Museion, Bredgade 62.
- No tickets required, doors open from 8.45.
The microbes living in and on us are crucial to our health – as well as causing both colds and existential threats. A disturbed microbial ecosystem can cause soils to deplete, guts to leak, and moods to darken. But how does one cultivate an invisible ecosystem, especially when whether microbes are good or bad for us depends on what else is going on?
In 2019 the Microbes on the Mind project set out to investigate how scientists, artists, philosophers, and citizens are thinking about this question. We found that everyone lacked ways to talk about, visualize, and engage with the mind-boggling idea that we are more than human: the idea that when we talk about human health, we’re talking about the dynamic state of a multispecies being entangled with its environments.
In this talk I will share some of the group’s findings, and our experiments to develop new ways to communicate, in collaboration with artists, podcasters, and curators. I argue for communicating about mess, process, and complexity alongside the everyday; the power of sound; and the provocative value of introducing microbes into enduring puzzles about mind and body.
